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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/23831131">Fight Sickness with Sickness</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/lovetincture/pseuds/lovetincture'>lovetincture</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Hannibal (TV)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Author declines to tag, M/M</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-04-25</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-04-28</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-02 17:27:09</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>3,189</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/23831131</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/lovetincture/pseuds/lovetincture</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>A series of domestic drabbles in the age of a pandemic. Based on the <a href="https://twitter.com/lovetincture/status/1239813242978840578">quarantine ficlet prompts</a>.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>6</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>97</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Fight</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>A while back, I made up some <a href="https://twitter.com/lovetincture/status/1239813242978840578">quarantine ficlet prompts</a>, just for myself. I like writing ficlets. I enjoy taking a hook of a word and stretching a story out like taffy from it. I don't know what these stories are going to be.</p>
<p>They're going to be about current events, probably. About living in the world, in this time. I don't know what else.</p>
<p>I'm declining to tag for a number of reasons, none of them very pressing. It's reactionary, maybe. It's also that I too am tired. These stories will be whatever they'll be. I expect them to come together slowly, no month-long deadlines here. No deadlines at all.</p>
    </blockquote><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>In a sense, they’ve been social distancing for years. It’s just a lot more literal now.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>They’ve only been inside for three days, and already it’s driving Will insane. Hannibal is his friend, his love, his other half. The sensation of being near him reminds Will of the way he’d heard amputee patients talk about their missing limbs. It’s the feeling of seeing an integral part of himself walking around of its own volition, using its own name and dressing itself in overly tailored suits.</p><p>He and Hannibal are close in a way most people can’t fathom when they use that word. And yet they’re solitary creatures through and through, creatures of habit grown old and stubborn in their ways before the world saw fit to bash them together like children’s dolls.</p><p>He’s realizing now how much he’d taken his space for granted.</p><p>If you’d asked him on any other day, one of the many sprawling, endless days before all this, Will would have said he doesn’t really <em>go</em> anywhere. Where does he have to go? It’s not like he works. Neither of them work. Even if they had the inclination (and he often does—he’s worked since before he was old enough to do so, doing odd jobs and getting paid under the table). The idleness of the obscenely wealthy chafes at him like a poorly fitted garment, bites into his flesh every day. Still, it’s not as though it’s safe for either of them to show their faces in public.</p><p>Maybe one day they’ll be able to go out the way other people do, without looking over their shoulders, without running errands apart so as to be less conspicuous. The public is intent in their focus, but easily bored. The virus has helped, actually. In a few more years, it’s possible they’ll be all but forgotten, relegated to tabloids, yesterday’s news. They’ll live on only in the nightmares of those who knew them best, even if their ‘understanding’ pales in comparison to the real thing.</p><p>In a sense, they’ve been social distancing for years. It’s just a lot more literal now.</p><p>And yet he’s keenly aware of the difference. He didn’t go anywhere, not really. Not to work or the movies, not to a weekly class, to the gym or the gun range, but he did go to the store. He did become friendly with the woman who worked at the pet store, the one who sells them that special prescription food one of the dogs eats. He did go for jogs in the park.</p><p>He’s keenly aware, now, just how much those little forays into the greater world grounded him, hooked him into the fabric of reality. It feels odd now. He feels cast adrift, loose on the waves, but this time it isn’t just him. The entire world is along for the ride, all of them bumping along, bumping together like life rafts.</p><p>It’s incredibly disorienting.</p><p>It’s been three days, and they’re driving each other fucking crazy. He’s not exaggerating when he mutters to himself that it’s an actual miracle that no one has drawn blood yet. They don’t fight like they used to. It’s been years since they’ve hurt each other just to feel like they could touch—they’ve found other ways to do that now, gentler ways to touch—and yet it simmers below the surface, that itch, that inclination toward violence, as permanent as any other fixture in their home. After all, it’s the first language they learned to speak together.</p><p>But he doesn’t want to fight. He wants to be alone, but he feels so strangely lonely. An ache in the center of his chest, like a hollowness. He never used to feel lonely. He wonders if it’s a side effect, and if so, of what. Of social isolation or of love? Which is the more virulent disease?</p><p>He doesn’t want to fight, so he loops an arm around Hannibal’s shoulder as he passes by. Hannibal, who’s sitting at his desk sketching something. His pencil rarely stops moving these days. There are no dour, gothic lamps here, just the natural light of day streaming in through the window. Will’s careful not to jostle his drawing arm.</p><p>He squeezes just once before letting go, presses a dry kiss to the side of Hannibal’s temple.</p><p>He can’t miss the fleeting smile that sweeps across Hannibal’s face, as rare and precious as rubies.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Bogged down</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>There's a storm outside.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>There’s some part of Will—a foolish, unexamined part, for it’s hardly a belief that can persist when held up to the light—that expected a life with Hannibal to omit all the tedious, messy angles of reality. It’s dumb, but it’s difficult not to get pulled into the slipstream that coalesces around him. He makes his life into high art (intentionally, so as not to go mad with the sheer banality of it), and no matter how well you know him, some part of you wants to nod along and agree that yes, this <em>is</em> art.</p><p>There’s art in more than just the killing. It’s there in the dinner presentation, perfectly white plates gleaming like teeth, the same flat, spit-sticky sheen, food piled atop them just so—no drips here, no siree. It’s obscene, for a given value of obscenity. He’s never seen someone do breakfast the way that Hannibal does, oatmeal loaded into these wide, flat bowls that look more like plates than they have any right to, all evidence of trembling, imperfect human hands cleared away. There’s a perfect swirl of berry compote marring the top, something black-purple and gleaming. He wonders that everything they do looks so much like blood.</p><p>But his life has barely changed on the micro level. Climbing out of bed is the same wherever you are, one foot in front of the other. Trying to piss with morning wood blocking the flow is as still annoying. His morning breath still tastes as horrifying in Cuba as it did in the eastern United States.</p><p>He still gets caught in the eddies of his mind. Tide pools open up to swallow him whole, not so harmless after all but filled with memories that look like fish, and they all have such razor-sharp teeth.</p><p>Easy to get bogged down there, when you don’t want to.</p><p>Easier still on days like this, with the rain pattering slowly against the glass. The world is grey and muted beyond the window that separates them. Will thinks of animals at the zoo. He thinks of glass cages, which means he thinks of Hannibal.</p><p>He imagines he can feel the humidity in the air, all of it clinging to his sweat-sticky skin as he raises a hand to the glass. It smudges badly beneath his fingers. The world looks like it’s crying, and the thought satisfies some dim, distant part of him. The difference in tone seems right, the split between outside and inside.</p><p>He, in the warm glow of incandescent lights, the whole house cloying with the scent and heat of Hannibal’s cooking. Something spiced, hot like cinnamon. The rest of the world in the cold and dark, it’s upside down. It’s not <em>poetic justice</em> or any other kind of justice at all, and some dark part of Will’s mind knows that’s right. There is no justice in the world, or at least, none that can bind Hannibal for very long, and Will’s interest in justice at some point went to die in Hannibal Lecter. A black hole to swallow up all the sun. Father, preserve and keep us.</p><p>Hannibal is too slippery, slipping the noose every time, taking Will with him, slick as eels.</p><p>Will’s head is pounding. He reaches in his pocket for a bottle of aspirin that no longer lives there. For a moment, he’d gotten so distracted that he forgot who he was.</p><p>The whole world’s losing track of time these days, and that feels right too.</p><p>As if just to spite him, the lights flicker, flashing an SOS in Morse code beat before cutting out.</p><p>He hears a thump, then rummaging in the kitchen.</p><p>It’s not any huge loss. As grey and dim as the sudden storm has made the day, it’s still daytime. The afternoon light creeps its way through the windows, watery and thin. It paints itself over Will’s face, and when he turns to look toward the sound coming from the other room, the house looks ghostly and muted. The visual is disorienting, so he turns back toward the window.</p><p>He considers the smudge left by his hand on the glass, a bare white handprint, and puts his mouth over it briefly. He flickers his tongue out to taste, and it's nothing like winter. Just cold, slick smooth glass and nothing else. A tang of cleaning chemicals, maybe. Sour.</p><p>He leans his forehead against the cool glass and maintains his vigil.</p><p>It’s only a few minutes before Hannibal makes it into the living room. He’s lighting candles, long, tapered white ones that Will’s never seen before. They look like the candles you’d expect to see during a power outage in a movie, and Will wonders if Hannibal bought them just for this. The thought makes him laugh.</p><p>“Hm?”</p><p>Hannibal lights the last candle and comes to stand beside him. Will knows he’s there without bothering to look. He can feel it in the disturbance of air, the way atoms seem to mold themselves around Hannibal’s presence. He leaves off his careful examination of the world beyond their walls, keeping his eyes fixed on the horizon until the last second. He turns around.</p><p>Hannibal looks fiendish in this light, the uneven illumination from flickering flames casting strange shadows across his face. It doesn’t do his severe bone structure any favors, and Will reaches up to fit his fingers in the hollow of Hannibal’s cheek, in the space beneath his zygomatic bone. He widens his legs on the bench so Hannibal can stand between them. He does, walking forward until his knees bump the edge.</p><p>“Aesthetically appropriate storm lighting.”</p><p>Hannibal dips his head, and the shadows change. “It costs very little to make a thing beautiful. Sometimes it costs nothing at all.”</p><p>“It’s worth wandering around the house like a ghost creating fire hazards if it spares us the horror of battery-powered lanterns,” Will translates.</p><p>Hannibal nuzzles into his hand, and Will presses harder, and that means yes.</p><p>“Do you feel like a ghost?” Hannibal asks.</p><p>“That assumes ghosts are self-aware. Do they touch each other, do you think?”</p><p>Hannibal tilts his head, considering. It ruins the angle, and Will lets his hand fall away.</p><p>“I like to think so, yes.”</p><p>“Why?” Will asks.</p><p>Hannibal looks out the window, and Will follows his gaze. He swears he sees something in the dark, a flicker of hooves, a twitch of feathers, but maybe it was nothing at all. It is awfully dark out there.</p><p>Will never gets his answer, but he doesn’t suppose it matters.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Ruby</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Breakfast</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Will hurts himself in a dozen small ways. It isn’t willful, as far as Hannibal can tell. It seems to be a kind of carelessness, using his body crudely, as if it were any other tool. Not a delicate instrument, but one of the ‘beater’ tools that Will keeps in a dented red aluminum case he’d salvaged from the wreckage of their former lives.</p>
<p>He wonders where Will learned it, if it was a habit picked up in his years of profiling—for Jack, who certainly used him hard—or before. Before he was Jack Crawford’s baying bloodhound, when he was nothing more than another blue cog in the criminal justice machine. One with an eye for the monsters. Good instincts, they’d have called it, back when they thought he was common enough to be tamed.</p>
<p>He tries it on, this image of Will, superimposing it over the flesh and blood version pouring omelette batter into a pan, but it doesn’t fit. Pieces stick out at the edges. The lines of the image waver.</p>
<p>Earlier, then. In childhood. He sees the child in the halls of the memory palace they both share, the gangly, long-limbed son of a rough man with shadowed eyes and a face too delicate. He’d have tried to toughen Will up, this father, partially out of fear, but mostly due to simple neglect. He wouldn’t have realized half the lessons he taught Will, the ones Hannibal has seen written on him decades hence.</p>
<p>Will’s father had a mind for motors and a taste for liquor, and he always secretly thought Will would’ve been better off with a mother. Hannibal disagrees, if only because he wouldn’t rewrite one iota of Will’s existence. The scars only add to the overall effect, the way a single wrong thread in a Persian rug pays homage to God.</p>
<p>And so Bill Graham had been wrong about that, and wrong in his fear. Not in its presence, but in its quality. He was afraid his son would grow up to be gay, with a face like a Botticelli. Hannibal can hear the word <em>fag</em> in his voice, slurred above a Southern twang, and his nose twitches in distaste. Will’s father didn’t know, then, what he should be afraid of.</p>
<p>Will turns to look at him, wry. “Prying, Hannibal?”</p>
<p>Hannibal spreads his hands on the table and looks at them, the places where veins protrude. He has gotten thinner since his incarceration. He’s lost muscle mass that will be difficult to regain at this point in his life. He wonders how Will feels about hunting, considers whether intensive physical therapy might be worth the effort.</p>
<p>“Merely thinking.”</p>
<p>“Kind of early for that.”</p>
<p>Will prods at a corner of the omelette with his bare finger, flinching back slightly with the heat of it. He sucks it into his mouth, soothing the small hurt, and slides a spatula beneath the corner of the egg. He flips it neatly, nearly perfectly. It wrinkles in on itself at the edge, and Hannibal leans back, watching Will prod it back into place, jiggling the pan until it slumps along the bottom, unwrinkled and undisturbed.</p>
<p>He’ll have to show Will how to flip an omelette correctly some time, with the quick flick of a wrist. They can practice with damp washcloths, like he did when he was learning, tutored by a Parisian chef.</p>
<p>Will parts the half moon of an omelette with his spatula, cutting it into two equal parts. He sets one on either plate and turns to grab a bit of parsley from the small pile waiting on the cutting board. He scatters it over the top, and Hannibal smiles.</p>
<p>There is pleasure to be had in this, in watching Will settle into their life, watching as he learns to enjoy the finer things. It’s there in the smallest gestures, a garnish lovingly draped across a meal, the way his bare feet pad across the marble tile. Will brings their plates to the table before returning to grab his mug off the counter near the range.</p>
<p>Hannibal waits for him, leaning in to inhale the fragrant steam rising off their meal. It smells like cream, like grass-fed eggs, chives and a hint of blood. He wonders when Will cut himself. Knife lessons too, then.</p>
<p>Hannibal waits, but Will takes his time. He leans back against the counter and brings the white ceramic mug up to his chin. His lips rest on the edge of it, and he closes his eyes and breathes.</p>
<p>When he opens his eyes, Hannibal is still watching him. Their eyes lock across the room, and Will inhales once more, heavy and deliberate. Hannibal wonders what coffee smells like filtered through Will’s nostrils, through his olfactory nerves and memories and associations. It burns for a moment that he’ll never know.</p>
<p>Will raises his cup in a small salute and drinks it down.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. Bottleneck</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>What will you do after the apocalypse?</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“What’s the first thing you want to do when we get out of here?”</p>
<p>Hannibal is quiet for so long that Will isn’t sure he heard the question. When he looks over, he sees him thinking.</p>
<p>“I would like to go back to that cafe we visited in Paris,” Hannibal says at last. “The one with the pistachio chocolate escargot.”</p>
<p>Will remembers that day. They’d gone to Paris shortly after fleeing the United States. They spent most of their days inside those first few weeks, in a perfect echo of their current circumstances. A need to lay low kept them indoors, but also their slow-healing bodies. Will remembers pacing the wooden floors of their rented second-story apartment as soon as he was well enough to do so, cabin fever and a need to move burning their way through him, as though idleness were a poison.</p>
<p>He doubts Hannibal remembers much of those weeks. He slept through most of it. He was in worse shape than Will, and it was touch and go there for a while. He grows quiet remembering it.</p>
<p>He’d thought about leaving. He’d have had to be insane not to. It would have been so easy to slip out the door—to give Hannibal his medicine and lose himself in the streets of Paris, float away, start a new life.</p>
<p>He’d considered it, but never particularly long or hard. It was an idle fantasy, like winning the lottery. There was nowhere he could go where he could root Hannibal out of him, nowhere far enough, remote enough, solitary enough. He was tangled in love’s untender mercies, and that’s just how it would be from now on. It was terrifying to consider for more than a few seconds at a time—far too much for him to handle—so he mostly didn’t. Life was difficult enough.</p>
<p>Theirs was a love best observed out of the corner of the eye.</p>
<p>But he remembers the escargots. His French still isn’t very good, so he can’t remember the name of the cafe in question, only remembers that its named worked out to Bread and Ideas in English. It was the first place they’d gone once they were well enough, still held together by gauze and twine but in no danger of bleeding out and causing a very public scene in a 10th arrondissement hospital.</p>
<p>Will never particularly cared for other people, but he remembers the walk to the bakery had an almost magical quality. It was only a few short blocks from their rented apartment—blocks that left him winded and aching—but the smell of asphalt and rain, the sight of people besides Hannibal and his own ruined face in the mirror—it was the relief of a pain he didn’t know he was cradling. It heralded a thawing of something hard and cold lodged inside his chest.</p>
<p>He remembers the crunch of flaky bits of sugar-encrusted pastry, the sweet, nutty cream clinging to the roof of his mouth, all the pavement around them glittering with freshly fallen rain. If he closes his eyes, he can taste and smell it all over again. He blinks his eyes open to find Hannibal’s eyes closed, damp at the edges, and Will knows he tastes it too.</p>
<p>“Good choice,” Will says, reaching across the table to squeeze Hannibal’s hand. “Can’t wait.”</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>The escargots Hannibal is remembering are <a href="https://www.tastecooking.com/will-instagram-du-pain-et-des-ideess-escargot-pastry/">definitely not snails</a>.</p>
        </blockquote><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>I borrowed the title from <a href="https://archive.newmuseum.org/exhibitions/605">a piece by the same name</a>, by performance artists Bob Flanagan and Sheree Rose.</p>
<p>I'm still on <a href="http://twitter.com/lovetincture">Twitter</a>.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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